Are they for real?
[Video][Website]
[4.00]
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: A slightly less forceful version of that one Fall Out Boy that came out earlier this year. Minus one point for being a little too much like a single that was perfectly fine.
[4]
Tara Hillegeist: Performing the same moves executed so crisply on Save Rock & Roll as if they were recorded on shoddy garage recording equipment does little to hide the hollowness beneath them, you know.
[0]
Alfred Soto: Fall Out at the Disco? The Panic Boys?
[3]
Brad Shoup: Whatever, we could use another rock band cribbing from Kanye’s 2010 playbook. These nasty boys (plus Butch Walker, the Rick Rubin of malls) relegate Lolo and her Jackson connection to a Victrola treatment. Urie saves the meaty part for himself, a Stumpish flow without the awkward idiom-making. I’m looking forward to his discovery of New Jack Swing.
[7]
Will Adams: I would deem this indistinguishable from Fall Out Boy’s recent work, except one group has good hooks, and the other doesn’t. Guess which side “MISSJACKSONMISSJACKSONMISSJACKSON (are you nasty?)” falls on?
[3]
John Seroff: Don’t be fooled by the chorus; the Jackson most closely referenced here is not Janet but Michael, by way of “Dirty Diana.” There’s the same self-centered and wronged little boy morality play, the same unrelenting and satisfying teeter-totter of melody, the same mad crescendo of guitars and syncopated semantic satiation of the title paramour. It’s all compulsively listenable and re-listenable and re-re-listenable and so on until I realize I left it on repeat an hour ago. Given the rich tradition of musical Miss (and Ms.) Jacksons out there, it says a lot that Panic! can hang with this storied crowd, packing little more than real dumb Fueled by Ramen fun. More please.
[9]
Katherine St Asaph: So when can we start calling a certain subset of dudes’ obsession with R&B signifiers (especially the ones with nastiness) what it is: ironic racism? “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark,” lit up and smelling like a garbage fire.
[0]